Four American Girl specials are headed for Amazon

The Mattel brand has signed a multi-year, multi-million-dollar deal with the SVOD, adding to its ongoing drive into the online video space.

Significantly adding to its ongoing digital content initiatives, Mattel-owned American Girl has signed a multi-year, multi-million-dollar production deal with Amazon that will bring four live-action specials to its Prime Video SVOD service.

The deal also includes options to produce multiple seasons of episodic content based on the American Girl brand’s characters.

The first special is scheduled to premiere on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Austria later this year. Two of the specials will feature characters from the BeForever franchise, and one will feature characters from the toy brand’s Girl of the Year franchise.

The programs join Amazon’s ever-increasing original kids programming slate, which includes live-action series Just Add Magic, which recently set a record as the most successful Amazon Original Kids premiere weekend in terms of U.S. Prime Video streams and hours. And the SVOD has recently announced that it’s coming off a year that saw 35% growth in U.S. Prime subscribers, which now total 54 million.

The content partnership comes amid some declines in American Girl gross sales, which dipped 2% to $109.9 million in Mattel’s third quarter of 2015. Mattel has been actively pushing the brand into the online video space, most recently through a YouTube collaboration with talent-sourcing platform Tongal for American Girl videos.